House Speaker Ben Lujan is retracting his statement that Senate Finance Chairman John Arthur Smith is racist.
But Lujan didn’t apologize in an interview with the Albuquerque Journal for his verbal assault on Smith, and he is continuing to defend the legislation Smith attacked on Saturday, the last day of the session.
“Maybe my choice of words could have been better,” the Journal quoted Lujan as saying. “But there was no reason to make an accusation things were suspicious of any kind.”
It was after Lujan slipped an already-killed proposal into an unrelated bill to try to resurrect it that Smith, on Saturday, opened the first conference committee in the history of the legislature, invited the press, and said that slipping the amendment into the bill created a “cloud of suspicion.”
The proposal to allow bigger cities and counties to issue bonds to finance private projects — and have the bonds repaid through lease payments — was Lujan’s attempt to help a developer fund a project at the Santa Fe Railyard.
Shortly after the session ended, Lujan called Smith a racist in an interview with two journalists. Moments later, he confronted Smith on the floor of the Senate in front of journalists and other senators.
“You are full of shit,” Lujan told Smith. “… You are not worth a darn. That’s what’s the matter with you. You are a racist S.O.B.”
‘11th hour… full-court press’ causes suspicion
Smith, in an interview with the Journal, brought up the fact that the House had twice voted down Lujan’s attempt to help the Railyard developer before Lujan slipped the amendment into the unrelated bill. The conference committee stripped the Lujan amendment from the bill.
Smith, in the Journal interview, explained why the amendment, brought up at the very end of the session, was suspicious to him.
“What is suspicious is when you see something happening again and again and again to see it get through. You try to dig deeper,” he said. “In the 11th hour we don’t catch things, usually. … There was a full-court press out to get that legislation through.”
Lujan was quoted by the Journal as saying he believed Smith thought he “had some interest in the property… that I was trying to promote myself and help myself. That was far from the truth, and that’s what got me aggravated.”
The House was in session on Saturday until nearly 3:30 a.m. before returning at 8:30 a.m. for the final few hours. Smith said he is giving Lujan “the benefit of the doubt that he was tired,” according to the Journal.